I’ve been playing with Monogame recently (an open source, cross-platform implementation of XNA). So far I have a little map editor for a game of some sort.
Need to keep reminding myself I’m making a game, not an editor…
…pause…
Still paused. Still using a rather sluggish Linux box (a Mini-ITX Ion). Played with coffeescript, didn’t like it much. I’m really not very keen on scripting languages where you only find out if something’s broken if you run it. I’d rather a more sturdy language with a fast build process. So now I’m looking at Monogame. It ticks all the right boxes. Cross platform, reasonably mature (an implementation of XNA), C# based, free (though you’d have to pay to use Mono to build on iOS or Android).
I just want to make something!
Anything!
Pause
Unfortunately my MacBook Pro succumbed to the Nvidia graphics card design flaw that causes the logic board to die. So I’m without my main machine, and working off a Linux box for the time being. That’s a bit of a problem if I want to do any Unity work (which I do!), as there’s no Unix version. So my space game is paused now, hopefully briefly.
In the meantime, to stave off boredom and because I want to, I’m going to play around with canvas and coffeescript again.
Hard
Trying to simulate something the size of a solar system without hitting problems due to floating point inaccuracy, without complicating things seems to be hard.
Tidied and bugfixed the mesh generation code and set up a test scene to test orbits. I want to be able to specify accurate elliptical orbits for all the large bodies in the solar system as a test, beginning with the earth and moon.
I recently learned that Frontier used circular orbits in all cases. I had assumed the simulation in that game had been more accurate. I’m sure the majority of players, like me, didn’t notice the lack of elliptical orbits. It’s not of massive benefit, but ideally I’d like my simulation to be accurate enough to correctly place the planets on any given date. Even if they are platonic solids.
